Researchers received letters last spring about their federal grant applications from a Department of Health and Human Services employee who hadn’t worked for the government in months.
Anna Caponiti, a former HHS grant specialist, had been laid off in 2025 as part of the Trump administration’s mass staffing cuts. Still, her name appeared on letters sent from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality — an office within HHS tasked with overseeing how Americans get care — nine months after she was let go.
Virtually no grant officers remain at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Over the summer, the Trump administration abruptly canceled at least 150 grants issued through the office, and now top political appointees won’t tell Congress where they’re redirecting those millions of dollars.
“We are trying to fulfill our obligation as grantees of the government and we can’t even do that right now,” Eric Roberts, a health economist at the University of Pennsylvania studying how to improve insurance coverage for people on both Medicare and Medicaid, told The Washington Sun.
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Roberts last heard from his program officer on Aug. 14, 2025. He texted the officer in January; his message was marked as “read” but he didn’t get a response.
Then, this July, Roberts — like dozens of other grantees — received a letter saying his grant had been terminated. He told The Washington Sun he hasn’t been able to file a final report on his findings because his grant is still marked “pending” on the portal.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality was once staffed by around 280, but more than 120 employees were let go in July 2025, including nearly all the grant officers.
Staffing continued to decline over the past year as employees left and weren’t replaced. The officers who manage relationships with grantees, shepherding their applications, ushering them through the peer review process and overseeing their work, were let go.
At the time of the firings, grantees — who study topics like preventing hospital-acquired infections or improving cardiovascular care — received emails saying the agency was unable to process awards and that future awards were uncertain. Then, over the past year, some were ghosted by grant officers, who stopped responding to emails and text messages.
Nora Becker, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan, said she wasn’t able to submit the final paperwork on the portal after her grant was canceled. She said the university’s grants staff decided to just email the final paperwork to a general email address at AHRQ.
“Insanity,” Becker wrote in an email.
And an unusual signature is on funding notices for grantees whose awards are continuing. While they would normally be signed by George Gardner, AHRQ’s grants director, recent notices have instead been signed by Kimberly Pendleton Chew, who works in the Food and Drug Administration’s grants division.
The health care research and quality office has emerged as a focal point for Democrats and health advocates who say the Trump administration isn’t being forthcoming about how it’s managing congressionally appropriated funds with a skeletal staff and has rescinded grant money that is now virtually untrackable.
“It appears that AHRQ is being intentionally run into the ground through a combination of incompetence and disregard for the law, and something needs to change,” Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) told deputy health secretary nominee Chris Klomp at his confirmation hearing in September.
About two-thirds of AHRQ’s grant dollars for 2026 are publicly unaccounted for, even though the agency’s director, Roger Klein, told a court this month almost all had been spent. AHRQ leaders have told the office of Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington) they are transferring the dollars to other agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, but haven’t released documents detailing exactly how.
This month, a congressional watchdog declared that the agency broke federal law by failing to spend all of its 2025 funds without notifying Congress of the changes. Baldwin and Murray wrote to the agency in September, asking it to detail how it’s spending the grant funds.
“I really don’t understand it. These are not state secrets, these are not things that are supposed to be kept under wraps,” said Aaron Carroll, president of AcademyHealth, a nonprofit representing health policy researchers that tracks AHRQ’s activities closely.
HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard said that “AHRQ has engaged in innovative, meaningful research and quality partnerships with other agencies” as part of its congressional appropriation but didn’t provide more details about where the grant money is going.
Congress created the agency in 1989 because people were getting very different medical care depending on where they lived. Its job was to fund research on how good health care is, what it costs, how well it works and who can get it.
The agency is now operating with about 70 staffers — about 25% of its usual workforce. At the same time, it has added political appointees. It used to have just one: the director.
Besides Klein, political appointees now include senior advisor Christina Chacon, chief of staff Erica Moshtahedian and senior advisor Tammy Born Huizenga, who has been charged with advancing priorities of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again initiative.
Kennedy highlighted AHRQ in his weekly email update to HHS employees sent Oct. 20 but made only a passing mention of its research work, instead focusing on its oversight of a preventive services task force and some surveys the agency conducts.
Congress gave AHRQ $215 million for research grants in 2026. While the agency typically awards about 400 new or ongoing grants annually, it has told Murray’s office it intends to fund just 90 this year. Last year, it funded one new grant and 206 ongoing grants.
“If they really have spent all the money, they should be able to show their work and show their work publicly,” said Stephanie Garlock, an attorney at Public Citizen, the progressive watchdog/advocacy group that is suing the administration over changes to AHRQ’s grant program.
The agency has said what it’s doing with some of the funds. About $30 million is being used on a joint initiative with the National Institutes of Health to make school lunches healthier. Another $7.5 million will go to sepsis management for the Indian Health Service. The agency is also awarding around $20 million in a competition for innovators that predated this administration.
But that leaves tens of millions of dollars publicly unaccounted for.
The Government Accountability Office ruled this month that HHS violated the federal impoundment act when it withheld 2025 funds from obligation and expenditure after announcing a reduction in force, without submitting a special message to Congress.
“There are researchers who invested a lot of effort, time and money into their projects and they don’t know if they’ll ever get results,” Garlock said.
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